Rosa Bathurst

May 10, 2018

I was in Rome not long ago and went to visit the graveyard where Keats and Shelley are buried. While there I discovered a large monument with this engraved on it:

Beneath This Stone Are Interred The Remains Of Rosa Bathurst Who Was Accidently Drowned In The Tiber On The 11 Of March 1824. Whilst On A Riding Party; Owing To The Swollen State Of The River, And Her Spirited Horse Taking Fright. She Was The Daughter Of Benjamin Bathurst Whose Disappearance When On A Special Mission To Vienna, Some Years Since, Was As Tragical As Unaccountable: No Positive Account Of His Death Ever Having Been Received By His Distracted Wife. He Was Lost At Twenty Six Years Of Age. His Daughter Who Inherited Her Father’s Perfections, Both Personal And Mental, Had Completed Her Sixteenth Year When She Perished By As Disastrous A Fate. Reader Whoever Thou Art, Who May Pause To Peruse This Tale Of Sorrows, Let This Awful Lesson Of The Instability Of Human Happiness Sink Deep In Thy Mind.- If Thou Art Young And Lovely Build Not Thereon, For She Who Sleeps In Death Under Thy Feet, Was The Loveliest Flower, Ever Cropt In Its Bloom.- She Was Every Thing That The Fondest. Heart Could Desire, Or The Eye Covet, The Joy And Hope Of Her Widowed Mother Who Erects This Poor Memorial Of Her Irreparable Loss. “Early, Bright, Transient, Chaste as Morning Dew”, She Sparkled, was Exhaled and Went to Heaven.